Essentially a photo album of the Space Race, this striking book is full of large color and black and white photographs (up to 22 x 11 inches) documenting U.S., Russian, Chinese, and private explorations into space, from rocket experiments in the 1940s to the Mars rovers, the International Space Station, and Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne. Sharp and beautiful images of the planets and stellar phenomena are well represented, but the book's emphasis is on the astronauts, vehicles, and programs that took humans and their robotic explorers into space.